Reconsidering the plight of the chicken and the eggA Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

All of God's creatures have rights, a fact that most people don't seem to
recognize. This includes both human and non-human animals, but not all of them
can speak for themselves. As we continue to disregard the value of the lives of the billions of animals we eat, we also are
destroying our air, land and water.

FROM

"I came to DC partly out of respect for chickens, but
also out of respect for those who fight against all odds, who dare to
question whether all the world revolves around humans, much as astronomers
believed for more than a millennia that the universe revolved around the
Earth....Karen Davis has no illusions what she’s up against in asking Americans to like
chickens, when what we most really like is chicken."

Washington, D.C.—The young mother passing the White House stopped to read
the arresting big posters spread along the grassy edge of adjacent Lafayette
Park. “Be glad you’re not a chicken,” she said to her child.

It was a perfect, mid-Atlantic spring day, trees freshly greening the
capital’s parks, ospreys sky dancing over the Tidal Basin, rockfish spawning
farther down the Potomac; a time to celebrate nature—including chickens.

It’s the nature of the chicken, disguised by generations of breeding for
maximum meat and egg production, that Karen Davis and her small band of
volunteers were here to impress upon whoever would listen.

The activist from Machipongo on Virginia’s Eastern Shore annually
declares this International Respect for Chickens Day (and month).

She’ll be back in November to respect the turkey, as the Obamas across
the street sit down to a traditional Thanksgiving feast.

I take my Salisbury University environmental studies classes to the
little sanctuary Karen has run for around 25 years as founder and president
of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit claiming membership of 15,000.

My aim’s not to make them animal rights activists or vegans; rather to
make them think.

Nathaniel and Karen Davis.
Photo by Richard Cundari, May 21, 2014

Students at SU will spend their four years in a region that annually
slaughters more than half a billion meat chickens. They will study in
buildings—Perdue Business School, Fulton Hall, Guerreri Center—named for
donors who made their fortunes on chickens.

My class hears from David Pollack, who was Perdue Farms’ head geneticist,
about all that’s been bred into the modern chicken to put it economically on
your table six weeks out of the egg.

But breeding in rapid weight gain, even feathers to distinguish male from
female chicks, doesn’t mean breeding out the essence of the wild jungle fowl
from which all chickens are descended, Pollack acknowledges.

This is clear when we enter the compound in Virginia where Karen tends to
more than a hundred chickens, turkeys and ducks; lives; and writes books
like Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs and fact sheets like
Philosophic
Vegetarianism.

Against a background of cackling and crowing, she lectures on the abuses
of factory farming like the professor she was (English literature,
University of Maryland, College Park). As we talk, chickens run freely, a
lilt and a bounce to their gait; they sunbathe, wings spread to soak up
vitamin D; and they dust-bathe, fairly wallowing in the soft earth, filling
their feathers with it.

Roosters perform little courtship dances for hens.

Chickens perch, scratch and peck after insects as well as socialize with
one another. Karen calls theirs a “joyful” existence, and it does seem so.

All of this, she says, is denied them in the crowded, artificially lit
confines of the broiler house or the caged confinement systems for egg
layers (broiler, or meat production, and egg production are different
businesses that use different breeds of chickens).

Karen cites research showing chickens are social creatures who see the
world in full color and with an intelligence—“cognition” is a better word —
that is surprisingly sophisticated.

This is all subjugated to the pursuit of cheap, abundant meat and eggs,
whose production pollutes the water and gives us an unhealthy level of
protein intake (about double our need) she argues.

She has no illusions what she’s up against in asking Americans to like
chickens, when what we most really like is chicken.

Back at the White House, she’s in conversation with a curious District of
Columbia cop, who looks at some of the grislier posters: egg layers with big
tumors, meat chickens hanging upside down, throats slit. He politely but
firmly declares, “I like eating chicken.”

Most of the UPC leaflets, which include meatless recipes, are handed out
and Karen and her small band, in T-shirts that say “Too Neat to Eat,” and
“Give a Cluck, Go Vegan,” are closing up shop. “Since I started this, there
has been a huge increase in the positivity of people’s reactions,” she said.

Another reason I take my environmental students to Karen’s little
sanctuary in the heart of commercial chickendom: Many may end up trying to
save a world that often acts as if it doesn’t want to be saved. Avoiding
burnout is a skill they will need.

“A lost cause doesn’t mean it’s not a good cause,” she tells them. She
doesn’t feel her cause is lost, just a long slog, as was civil rights, gay
marriage, women’s suffrage.

I came to DC partly out of respect for chickens, but also out of respect
for those who fight against all odds, who dare to question whether all the
world revolves around humans, much as astronomers believed for more than a
millennia that the universe revolved around the Earth.

Respect for the rest of nature is a lesson we’re still learning.

*Tom Horton is a writer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He covers the
Chesapeake Bay Area and teaches at Salisbury University. From time to time
he brings students to United Poultry Concerns to meet our chickens and be
exposed to our world. This year, Tom also attended our annual International
Respect for Chickens Day leafleting event at the White House in May. He once
described United Poultry Concerns as the “lonely counterpoint” to the
Delmarva chicken industry.

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